Reassembling Ford Time is Money in Brian O’Nolan’s Brave New Ireland Andrew V. McFeaters Broward College Roger Burlingame’s Henry Ford (1957) is among the books maintained in Brian O’Nolan’s personal library at Boston College.1 It covers the length of Ford’s life: his lack of interest in becoming a farmer like his father, his stint in watch repair, and his rise as the automotive giant who challenged the manufacturing and marketing conventions of his time. Burlingame captures Ford’s breadth and depth of ambition, showing that Fordism was as much about social engineering as it was about automotive production. In short, Fordism was inseparable from the American dream. His book seems to emulate H. G. Wells’s popular Outline of History, which it mentions during its critique of Ford’s own complex attitudes toward history. Burlingame highlights Ford’s distrust of elitist history and his enthusiasm for practical history, the latter evidenced in Ford’s vast museum in Dearborn, Michigan: ‘His aim was to display the entire world sequences in agriculture, transportation, communication, and manufacture from the most primitive tools to the most advanced machines.’2 The museum captures a past that leads to an ineluctable future: Fordism. O’Nolan’s novels and columns evince an enduring interest in Henry Ford. Ford is overtly referenced in At Swim-Two-Birds and in the unfinished, posthumously published, Slattery’s Sago Saga. Ford appears several times in Cruiskeen Lawn, his colossal influence as a global harbinger of modernisation seeping through Myles na gCopaleen’s topical critiques. O’Nolan’s oeuvre as a whole, in spite of the gaps between his novelistic efforts, accrues a socio-political critique on the influences and consequences of modernisation, technology, and capitalism on Ireland’s political economy and cultural history. For O’Nolan, Ford occupies the vanguard of these changes. Myles discusses Ford’s influence in a 14 April 1947 issue of The Irish Times. This column is characteristically Mylesian, building satirical momentum through seemingly digressive side roads. He begins by concocting a connection between himself and Ford: they both have roots in County Cork. This topic detours into Myles’s complaint that he could not secure a job with the Ford Motor Company some years earlier, a subject which then reverses into a peripheral story about one of Myles’s The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 3.1. (Fall 2014) favourite characters, Keats, albeit without his friend, Chapman. In a historical anecdote, Keats, a sixteenth-century ‘soothsayer,’ prophesises to the Irish chieftain, Hugh O’Neill, that ‘There’s a Ford in [his] future.’3 Here ‘Ford’ refers to both the Battle of the Yellow Ford of 1598, in which the Irish defeated English forces, and to the Ford Motor Company’s advertising campaign, which, according to David L. Lewis’s The Public Image of Henry Ford, ‘became the immediate post-war era’s best-known automobile slogan.’4 This circular conflation between past, present, and future then drives home a more general discussion on the impact of Fordism on the modern world: Considerable as was Ford’s innovation in the sphere of transport, his technology had primarily a social impact. His assembly line method rationalised and completed the Industrial Revolution […], deluging every stratum of society with cheap utensils and machines eradicating a great amount of domestic drudgery and squalor, and with it the slave class it had created. At the same time, hope was created for the mechanisation of agriculture […]. A revolution in human living caused by abolishing the necessity for laboriously constructing individual articles is a revolution in time. In addition to showing how that could be done, Ford, with his Model T car, effected a companion revolution in space.5 Although Myles’s initial prognosis carries a utopian fervour that speaks to how material effects of technology transform social relations in the name of progress, not all his estimations of Ford are positive. He adds that Fordism paved the way for ‘fast- growing industrial jungles, ignorant money-sodden men assum[ing] demagogic roles, financial Frankensteins shoulder[ing] philosophers from pulpits, [and] newspapers [becoming] instruments for shaping the future rather than recording the present.’6 In the last section of the column, Myles discusses how only America could produce Ford, and he quotes large passages from Lee Strout White’s essay, ‘Farewell, My Lovely!’ which appeared in The New Yorker in 1936. The quoted passages eulogise the passing of Ford’s Model T, a way of life: ‘The driver of the old Model T was a man enthroned.’7 Anthony Cronin informs us in No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien that O’Nolan purchased a Ford Anglia in around 1947, leaving behind his old Morris. O’Nolan was one among many post-war automotive consumers. As Cronin writes, ‘With the end of the war, petrol had become available again in Ireland and private cars were allowed back on the roads.’8 According to his account of O’Nolan’s driving skills, this might not have been the safest development for Ireland. On the economic upside, however, Ford production rebounded in Ireland after World War II. In Are You Still Below? The Ford Marina Plant, Cork 1917–1984, Miriam Nyhan details that ‘The second half of the century began in Cork with an optimistic start at Henry 43 The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 3.1. (Fall 2014) Ford & Son Limited. At 2.15pm on 18 July 1950, the longest serving employee, Bill O’Connell, drove the 75,000th vehicle built in Cork since 1932 off the assembly line’ and the ‘[unconvincing] production figures of 2,379 in 1946 paled beside those of 11,007 and 11,881 in 1949 and 1950 respectively.’9 After the global effects of the Great Depression, the economic war between Ireland and Britain, and the belt-tightening state policies of World War II, Ireland was back on the road to modernisation. The Cork plant was an essential component of Ireland’s economy, with a domestic and international market, producing cars, vans, and lorries along with its bread and butter, the Fordson tractor.10 Time and space were indeed going through a revolution. By the time At Swim-Two-Birds was published in 1939, Ford already had spread his utopian zeal to Ireland, having built the assembly plant in Cork in 1932, the foundry dating back to 1917. As in America, Ford was a harbinger of modernisation in Ireland, and there was no turning back. Fordism accelerated consumption-production relations, commodity standardisation, mechanisation, labour distribution, and urbanisation. Fordism changed the speed of life, affecting social behaviour through consumerist enculturation and material relations. While much of Ireland still matched its postcard depictions – a patchwork of green fields, farms, and villages – modernity, with a specifically American sheen, continued its advance on Ireland’s agrarian and cultural traditions. O’Nolan’s novels, early and late, represent ambivalent responses to Ireland’s split between tradition and modernity. The Gaels in An Béal Bocht are initially terrified of motor-cars: ‘When the first motor came in view, many paupers were terrified by it; they ran from it with sharp screams and hid among the rocks but issued forth again boldly when they saw there was no harm whatever in those new- fangled machines.’11 The interim between fear and assimilation is brief, reflecting Myles’s accelerated revolution in time and space. In At Swim-Two-Birds, the student narrator’s friend Brinsley remarks in an anachronistic gesture, ‘Slaveys […] were the Ford cars of humanity; they were created to a standard pattern of a hundred thousand’ and it is Trellis who manufactures human beings and who is later punished for exploitative practices.12 O’Nolan, Myles, and O’Brien’s shared vision of Fordism reveals the merging between humanity and technology in the Machine Age. Maebh Long’s Assembling Flann O’Brien explicates the compositional methods and polyphonic effects of pastiche in At Swim-Two-Birds, noting the novel’s resistance to hierarchical reading.13 These methods and effects of assembly, I would add, reflect O’Nolan’s purposeful confusion between human and technological production, garnering a socio-political critique of a modernising Ireland. In fact, O’Nolan’s preoccupations mirror widespread anxieties of the time. On 27 March 1937, one anonymous Irish Times contributor apocalyptically wrote in an essay titled ‘Man and the Machine’: 44 The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 3.1. (Fall 2014) It is said that the increasing use of machinery in industry will deprive the world of its craftsmen, and that the monotony of the machine-minder’s job will produce a race of robots […]. It is characteristic of the new industrialism that on one occasion Mr Henry Ford is reported to have said that for his industrial purposes the untrained man was preferable to the trained man, because he had less to unlearn.14 Here, as in O’Nolan’s writing, engineering and social engineering are inextricably linked in the imagination of the day. Ford was notorious for his vision of factory production as a well-oiled machine, segmenting labour into easily learnable and repeatable tasks – as if the collective of human labour could be perpetually improved like an engine itself. To this purpose, Ford also disregarded the line between private and public life within his factory cities, introducing policies to promote “moral” behaviour, such as abstention from alcohol consumption. Trellis practices similar managerial methods in At Swim-Two-Birds. In contradiction to the student narrator’s vision of the modern novel, which should avoid ‘despotic’ and ‘undemocratic’ writing, and which should support ‘a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living,’ Trellis’s novel seeks to control the humans he manufactures, eliminating boozing and instilling ‘moral’ behaviour.